All posts by bponnaluri@gmail.com

Updated rules

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A major problem with board games is people getting bored while waiting for their turn. After realizing that this was a major problem with Clash of Empires, I decided to find a way to make the game shorter Instead of allowing people to take unlimited actions as long as their units could move, I limited each player to 1 action per turn.

Based on playtesting with shorter turns, things went well. The other two players were more engaged, and did not get distracted with their phones because of low downtime between turns. Afterwards, their feedback was very positive, and said they enjoyed the game more than Risk.

One of the main goals of Clash of Empires is to make sure that stronger players cannot gain an overwhelming advantage over other players. With the new rules for turns, weaker players will be more efficient at using actions to attack and defend themselves.

Online Dominion

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I am currently talking a break from developing Clash of Empires to make an online implementation of the card game Dominion.

Dominion_game

In March 2013, the unofficial implementation on Isotropic was forced to shut down because of the release of the official version on Goko.

The official version currently has several signficant issues.

  • There are major bugs such as games failing to start, or an inability to allow other players to join your game.
  • It is difficult to find a game to play because Goko splits up all the players into rooms with a capacity of 50.  There is no ability to filter out the list of games to only display open games, or use the matchmaking feature to find games in other rooms.
  • The game has significant issues with lag.
  • The user interface makes the game difficult to play,  and makes important information hard to find.
  • When selecting a group of 10 cards to play with, you must either select all 10 cards manually, or have all cards be randomly selected. There is no middle ground to allow players to exclude specific cards they don’t like or focus on certain cards with random kingdom generationAs a result, I am working on developing an unofficial version of Dominion with altered card art and text.

    A prototype of the game can be found here.

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Card Driven Combat.

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I decided to stop working on adding complexity to the combat system for now. Clash of Empires already had a decent combat system, and I did not want to risk people losing interest because of the complexity. My plan is to keep the rules as simple as possible and introduce additional complexity in expansions.

Last year, I experimented with removing dice rolling from Clash of Empires and resolve combat by comparing army sizes in order to speed the game up. People who test Clash of Empires said they liked not having die rolling, so I decided to keep it out of the game.

no-dice

However, I realized that the game could use a source of randomness to make sure the game did not become too predictable when the players followed the same strategy in different games. Initially, I considered having a map that was randomly generated as the game progressed. However, this ended up being an issue because the additional components and rules made things too confusing. I also considered randomly assigning territories to players at the beginning of the game, but realized that there would be issues where the distribution of starting territories had too much of an effect on the winner.

In June, I played a wargame called 1775 Rebellion, which used a card-driven system to resolve player actions. I enjoyed the game and felt that the card-driven system added a good amount of strategy.

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I then thought about my experiences playing other card-driven games such as Memior 44, and decided that doing something similar would be a good idea for Clash of Empires. Each turn, players will draw a card and play a card. By playing a card, a player can take an action such as attacking or recruiting troops. In addition to adding randomness, these rules should allow turns to go faster and keep people engaged.

Another advantage of a card-driven system is that there are many ways of developing the idea further. Here are some possible ideas.

  • Allow the player to build their deck as the game progresses.
  • Allow the players to construct their own decks of action cards before the game starts like in games such as Android Netrunner.
  • Have different decks for each nation that reflect their historical strengths and weaknesses.